


Mara Jade: Child of the Emperor

by ScourgedQueen



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Fusion, Gen, Imperial Era
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:34:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29582430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScourgedQueen/pseuds/ScourgedQueen
Summary: Trained from childhood as an elite agent of the Emperor, Mara Jade is sent to a planet on the Outer Rim in search of a target of great importance to her Master's plans. Though highly skilled, her abilities remain untested in the field, and the dangers she might face are greater than any test the Emperor could have subjected her to.
Kudos: 4





	Mara Jade: Child of the Emperor

_Chapter 1_

_Uncharted System: Outer Rim: 2 BBY_

Alarms blared, the angry red of warning lights flickering madly as the ship spun out of control. The pilot wrenched on the control stick, the small craft rattling as it tried to level off and the hull creaking from the strain. The view outside the cockpit was a blur of dark-grey streaked by flashes of electricity that crawled along the clouds like webbing, causing a churn in the pilot’s gut every time she glanced up from the controls.

Focus.

“This is Agent Green. Atmospheric anomalies have disrupted my controls. Attempting emergency landing!”

She wrenched on the controls again, feeling the strip strain, followed by a cacophonous rending of metal as warning messages filled the screens on her control panel. Yet the fighter’s spiral slowed, the pilot gritting her teeth as she forced the craft to finally right itself. The ground rushed up at her through the viewport. Too fast. Too close. She wrenched up on the stick just as her ship slammed through the jungle canopy and into the undergrowth below.

#

" _Ag…Green…ease res…”_  
Beyond the broken static, the words came to her as if she were submerged in water—distorted and slow. It took a few painful moments before she could even focus her eyes enough to find the comm controls, thumbing on the transceiver and wincing at the sharp crackle of noise that resulted.

“ _Phantom_. This is Agent Green. I’m alive. Barely.” Every inch of her ached from the impact, though the crash webbing had kept her from any serious injury. The transparisteel viewport at the fore of the cockpit had been smashed in, branches stabbing inside at awkward angles, near enough that it was sheer luck that she hadn’t been impaled on any of them. “I doubt the v1 will be flying anytime soon.” She thought, for a moment, to request extraction. Not immediately—she still had a mission to complete, after all—but the _Phantom_ was distant, and she’d never enjoyed relying on anyone else for her own survival. “Mission is still underway. Don’t wait up.” She paused, waiting a moment for a response, and only receiving static. If the v1’s subspace transceiver was damaged, then it was unlikely that anyone had even heard her. So be it.

Pain lanced up her side as she lifted a leg enough to reach the knife sheathed in the top of a boot, cutting away the crash webbing and forcing open the entry hatch with a squeal of protesting metal, allowing herself to climb out and drop to the ground amidst the wreckage. From the outside, the craft had fared even worse than she’d realized. One of the S-foils had snapped off, likely the source of the noise she’d heard while trying to right the ship in the air, and the other was bent at an odd angle—folded in on itself in a way that even the TIE/ad v1 wasn’t designed to do. Huge shafts of splintered wood had pierced the hull here and there, and a thin plume of dark, oily smoke rose from the engines. Repairing the thing was out of the question. She sighed, tugging off her helmet and tossing it into the pile of metal and wood that used to be her ship, sliding her fingers through her mane of vibrantly red hair. She had a mission to complete, and after that? She’d improvise.

If there was one thing Mara Jade knew she was good at, it was improvisation.

Around the crash, the area seemed to reflect most of what she’d seen from above as she’d penetrated the planet’s cloud-cover—the visible landmass covered in an endless jungle, with who only knew what sort of creatures lurked beneath the trees. Creatures that she hoped would be scared off by a chunk of screaming metal slamming into the ground, rather than enticed. The environment alone would be a problem. It was muggy and warm, the moisture from the air already clinging to her skin as she shrugged off her flight jacket and set it aside before climbing back up the wreckage to retrieve the survival supplies she kept inside of it for just this sort of eventuality. Two days of food, a small survival kit, and a handful of other compact tools kept inside of a sturdy satchel that she slung over her shoulder, the flight jacket stuffed inside along with them. The heat and humidity were bad, of course, but with no way to know what nights on this Force-forsaken planet were like it was better that she took it with her. The last thing she wanted to do was freeze to death before her mission was completed. Two days. Two days to finish the job and get off-world before she had to figure out if anything on the planet was even edible. Mara didn’t relish finding out what new and inventive toxins existed there, or what they could do to human physiology.

The jungle that surrounded the crash site was silent, which stood to reason. Still, Mara kept a hand near the blaster she kept strapped to her thigh as she set off into the trees, green eyes keeping sharp watch for anything that might be lurking in the shadows that clung under the canopy. Through the rare gape in the foliage, the sky above was an angry grey, split only by the strange electrical anomalies that sent webs of purple-white light spidering across the clouds. The same disturbances that she’d seen as she’d tumbled out of the sky, and the same that had struck the v1 on her initial descent through the blanket of clouds and sent her into that wild descent in the first place. The whole planet felt _wrong_. Not just the charge in the air, either—An electrical crackle she could feel on her tongue—but something more. A darkness that she felt on the back of her mind like a constant pressure, something she normally only felt in the presence of her Master.

“Keep it together, Mara. Focus,” she said, chiding herself. Her information had gotten her to the planet, but that was it. The target her Master had sent her to eliminate was here, somewhere—Hiding in a planet-spanning jungle on a world that exuded darkness and danger. Easy enough.

#

Jedi Aridun Fayne had come to this uncharted world of unbroken jungle and never-ending electrical storms seeking refuge in the wake of his Order’s destruction. Instead, for seventeen years, it had been his prison. The Dark Side oozed from every surface of this world, tainting the plants, animals, even the air he breathed. Each breath eroded his will and dragged him deeper toward the darkness, but he was resolute.

_It is only a matter of time…_

Sibilant whispers, all too familiar to him, slithered from the darkness around him. They pried at the corners of his mind, trying to disrupt his meditation. Each day they tried to penetrate the fortress he’d built around himself, forcing him to spend more of his focus on maintaining the purity of his soul.

_You are the last of your pathetic Order..._

_Never shall you leave this place. You will die here, Jedi…_

_The Dark Side is inevitable. Soon, you will be ours, and the Jedi will be no more…_

They continued to assail him, and he tensed, sharpening his focus more to deaden the whispers. As he had every day for such a long time. When they finally fell silent again, or at least dulled to a wordless murmur at the fringes of his awareness, he let himself unfold again, reaching out with the force and feeling the resonance of the jungle around his refuge. He looked for those barest glimmers of the Light that existed even here, pinpoints of starlight hovering in a black void. It helped to center himself. To remain sane.

His eyes snapped open as an entirely new sensation overtook him. It began as a tremor, not simply in the ground beneath him but in the Force itself, rippling out across the landscape. At it core, an entirely new presence. It was difficult to read, but the seed of darkness that he sensed within the being told him enough.

They had come for him.  
Rising to his feet, Aridun cast about the small ruin that had been his home since his arrival, pulling the lid from a battered storage case and rummaging around within it until he found what he had hoped to never wield again—his Lightsaber. He thumbed the activation switch, a blade of shimmering emerald erupting from the battered hilt.

“Let them come…” Aridun breathed, gazing upon the blade, awed by its beauty after all this time spent dormant. “I will be the sword that avenges the Order.”

_Yes…_

He ignored the whispers as they began again, flitting around his mind like a swarm of insects. The monsters that had destroyed the Jedi had come for him, at last, and he would be ready. Aridun Fayne would make them _pay_.

#

Mara already hated this planet. The journey from the wreck of the V1 had been slow going, the jungle thick enough that Mara had been forced to use her vibroknife to carve through the tangle of vines and other plant-life. The lightsaber dangling from her belt would have made quicker work of it, certainly, but lightsabers were obvious. They made noise—at least, more noise than a vibroknife. She cut through a thick vine and stepped through to find herself on the edge of a clearing. Through the break in the trees, she could see a shape towering over the jungle around it in the distance, far enough away that she couldn’t make out if it were a mountain or structure.

She lowered her pack to the ground, fishing a device from her pocket and switching it on. A holographic projection flickered to life, displaying a topographical view of part of the planet’s surface. The lines were muddy, the scanner readings imprecise due to the interference from the storm. If there was one thing in this entire mess she was thankful for, it was that she’d managed to crash on the same continent as her target, at least. From the scanner readings, the looming shape on the horizon looked even more like a structure, its outline too angular to be created by natural forces. That, then, was where she needed to go. She deactivated her map, trading the holoprojector for her commlink.

“ _Phantom_ , this is Agent Green. Do you read?”

The comm crackled and buzzed. A sound that _might_ have been a voice was faint behind the static, but she couldn’t make out the words.

“ _Phantom_ , please repeat your transmission. _Phantom_!” She felt a rush of annoyance spike through her, but she tamped it down. “Baz. Dammit, it’s Mara. Answer the bloody comm.” Nothing. She sighed, clipping the comm back on her belt and wiping the sheen of sweat from her brow. There wasn’t a point in getting angry about something neither she nor Baz had any control over, but something about the planet—something outside of the oppressive humidity and difficult terrain—put her on edge. Snatching her pack back up, Mara started to move again, eyes lifting to the structure in the distance.

_You are not alone…_

_Not alone!_

_Not Sith…_

The whispers bubbled up in the back of her head, unbidden. She spun, blaster pulled free of its holster, scanning the trees behind her. Nothing was there. She waited, reaching out, focusing her senses…but she sensed nothing. Not unless the vermin scurrying through the undergrowth could make her hear voices. She slid her blaster away again and drew a breath, steadying herself before moving across the clearing and delving into the jungle once again—now with a clear destination.

#  
Mara doubled over once she reached the foot of the structure, a broad base of crumbling stone choked with vines that had grown up and over it. She had picked up the pace when what little light reached the jungle floor began to dim, having no desire to find out what stalked the trees at whatever this planet had for a night cycle—especially without knowing how long the night might last, here. She’d arrived at a corner of the massive structure, the sloping, stepped walls meeting at a sharp angle and moving off in either direction out of sight. When she had seen it from afar, the structure had looked like a small mountain. Finding the entrance, especially in the dark, wouldn’t be easy.

Keeping a hand on the crumbling wall beside her, Mara pulled out a glowrod and moved slowly along—probing the wall as she did so, the light held high in the hopes it might illuminate something out of the ordinary. The last of the light faded, plunging the jungle into darkness save for the circle of light cast around her, and after some time Mara had to step back and recognize that she wasn’t likely to find the entrance any time soon. She’d been moving non-stop since leaving the _Phantom_ and running herself completely ragged wouldn’t do her any favors. Pacing away from the wall, she scaled one of the warped trees that had grown close to the structure’s base and settled into the crook of a branch.  
“Baz. You there?” She said, chewing her lip as she listened to the comm static again. “ _Phantom_ , please respond. I’m getting close.”

The dark brought with it a host of strange noises, the hooting and calling of unfamiliar creatures. Mara switched off her glowrod, letting her eyes re-adjust as she scanned the trees one more time. The noises were far enough off that it was unlikely anything was close enough to harm her. There was that, at least. She pulled a ration bar out of her bag, gnawing on it as she considered her next moves.

#

Somewhere below, something began to stir in the dark of the jungle. Night was its time, of course, but so often it chose to sleep—so rarely did anything of interest pass into its territory. The creatures of Dromund Kaas knew better, and that suited it. It hunted not to eat, but to _destroy_ , and there was no pleasure in destroying something so weak as to scurry in fear from its approach. Once, perhaps, it would have relished in the slaughter. Now, it slept, nourished only by the Dark Side energies that permeated the planet’s surface and crackled across the sky above. There had been a moment, long enough ago that it hardly remembered when, but near enough that it still remembered at all, that it had sensed something new. That sensation had been fleeting, however, and it had not dared enter his domain since. Now, though, it felt a presence that confused it. One filled with uncertainty, filled with loneliness and loss, yet a seed of something truly dark festering at its core. But it was more than that. Again, the creature stirred, rising and shaking the dust from its body that had accumulated over its centuries of dormancy. There was something else, there. Another presence that clung to the first like a shroud, a phantom that resonated with nothing but pure _malice_. Saliva dripped from the creature’s jaws as it focused in on that emotion, a wordless hunger growing in its gut. The desire to rip flesh, to taste blood. It had not felt that in so very, very long.

Its body was slow to wake. So long in its dormant state had left it sluggish, claws grinding deep furrows in the stone of its resting place as it forced itself to rise. Soon, the sleep would fall away, and for the first time in a millennium the beast would hunt worthy prey.


End file.
